Four books a year?

I just finished reading this article which talks about how many books a person should write. By the way, the answer is how many they want.

But it was in response to this article about someone saying that writers shouldn’t write four books a year. Reading through her article I can see her point. What is your end game? Be known for producing a few top quality novels? Or maybe churning out more but lesser quality ones? Or maybe you just want to pump up your catalog?

In relation to me, my books and stories are beginning to seem like they might be shorter works. Not like the contracted 100,000 words a publisher wants. I don’t think I can write a novel that long. They end up the length they end up. I don’t have a word limit goal in mind when I start them. And I’m not going to pad up the story with things that aren’t needed.

Thank people for creating self-publishing websites and platforms. It’s them that have allow people like me to achieve my dreams. I don’t think I’d be able to do it with traditional publishing houses. And maybe that’s a good thing too.

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2 thoughts on “Four books a year?”

I agree. I think books are getting too long. I read a book recently which I had to stop reading half way through because the plot was confusing and some things were unclear, but I realised afterwards that if it had been a shorter book, I’d have finished it by now. It was five hundred pages, which is very long, I think. Very good books are short, Muriel Spark wrote short novels, Scott F Fitzgerald did too. And J D Salinger. I didn’t know publishers ask for 100 000 words – that’s absurd! 🙂 Let stories be as short as they want to be, I say 🙂